Simon Taylor (sugar planter)

Simon Taylor (23 December 1739 – April 1813)[1] was a Scottish slave owner, the wealthiest sugar planter in the Colony of Jamaica, and one of the wealthiest men ever to have lived in the British Empire. Sir George Nugent, 1st Baronet, who was Governor of Jamaica between 1802-6, described Taylor as "the richest proprietor in the island". At the time of his death, Taylor's estate was estimated at probably worth over £1 million,[2][3] equivalent to £65,729,771 in 2019. His brother was Sir John Taylor, 1st Baronet.

Simon Taylor
detail from The family of Sir John Taylor by Daniel Gardner
Born23 December 1739
Jamaica
DiedApril 1813
Jamaica
NationalityBritish
Parent(s)Patrick Tailzour

Early life

Taylor was born in Jamaica in 1739, the first-born son of Patrick Tailzour who migrated to Jamaica from Forfarshire in Scotland, and anglicised his surname to Taylor. Patrick married Martha, the daughter of a successful white Jamaican sugar merchant. Patrick took over the business of his father-in-law, and increased his wealth from his operations as a sugar merchant in Kingston, Jamaica.[4]

In 1754, Patrick died when Simon was just 14 years old. At the time, Simon was being educated in England at Eton College, having been sent there by his father. At the 20 years old, Simon Taylor returned to Jamaica to take charge of his father's properties. His father left him a vast fortune of £50,000, making him one of the wealthiest men on the island.[5] Taylor went on to substantially increase his wealth from that useful bequest.

Sugar planter

In the early 1760s, Taylor began his first foray into sugar and slavery when he converted his father's 900-acre estate at Lyssons in Saint Thomas Parish, Jamaica into a sugar plantation. At the same time, he bought the Llanrumney sugar estate in Saint Mary Parish, Jamaica. In 1771, he bought another sugar estate in St Thomas, called Holland, containing 430 acres of sugarcane, and including 400 enslaved people. Taylor also operated as an "attorney" for several absentee planters for estates such as the Golden Grove estate, owned by Chaloner Arcedeckne. Taylor added to his wealth by charging Arcedeckne substantial sums for his services.[6]

Taylor chose to live on the outskirts the capital Kingston, and bought a property named Prospect Pen, which he made his home.[7] This property is now the official residence of the Office of the Prime Minister of Jamaica, and has been renamed Vale Royal.[8]

Political representation

Taylor sat as a representative of the Assembly of Jamaica for most of his adult life. In 1763, he was elected by the white voters of Kingston as one of their three representatives. In the 1760s, he witnessed a standoff between a leader of the Assembly, Nicholas Bourke, and the governor, William Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton, over who should stand costs for the island's defence. Though Bourke won in the end, and Lyttelton was recalled, Taylor was not a believer in Bourke's stance of openly challenging the British government.[9]

Taylor served in that post until 1781. Then, from 1784 to his death in 1813, Taylor represented the parish of St Thomas.[10]

Personal life

Despite his wealth, Taylor never married, instead choosing to co-habit with a number of "housekeepers", who were sometimes enslaved Black women, but were often free people of color. One of his mixed-race mistresses was Grace Donne, a "quadroon" who lived with him for more than 30 years, and was the mother of at least one of his mixed-race children. Grace was also a "doctress", who used the hygiene and traditional herbal remedies employed by obeah women, to nurse Taylor back to health when he became ill with a fever.[11] Grace was a contemporary of a successful group of Jamaican doctresses, such as Cubah Cornwallis, Sarah Adams, and Mrs Grant, the mother of Mary Seacole. Their traditions of using hygiene were arguably adopted by Florence Nightingale a century later.

Even though Taylor had several mixed-race children some of whom were born and remained in slavery, Taylor never saw them as his heirs, because of the black ancestry of their mother. In addition, Jamaican law at the time forbade planters from passing on significant amounts of property to their "mulatto" offspring. In 1804, Grace died, leaving Taylor distraught.[12]

Instead, Simon Taylor always considered his younger brother John to be his heir, but while Simon was frugal, John was a spendthrift, and Simon often disapproved of his younger brother's extravagant lifestyle. Simon persuaded John to return to Jamaica to take control of the estates he had inherited in Hanover Parish, but within a year of arriving, John died in 1786. Simon was then saddled with the additional problems of clearing the debts incurred by John's Hanover estates.[13]

The elder Simon would in later years complain about the extravagance of his nephew and namesake in England, but he was reluctant to encourage him to return to Jamaica, after the death of John.[14]

Maria, Lady Nugent, the governor's wife, wrote that Taylor had mulatto mixed-race children with slave women on every one of his estates.[15]

Pro-slavery campaigning

Taylor campaigned in favour of retaining the Atlantic slave trade, and he was bitterly disappointed when the British parliament voted to abolish in 1807. His health then declined for the remaining years of his life, during which time he took no further active part in local or imperial politics.[16]

Taylor opposed attempts by missionaries to spread Christianity among the slaves. One missionary, William James Gardner, described Taylor as "a man of degraded habits". Gardner added that "no planter was ever possessed of more power than this imperious, vulgar man".[17][18]

Death and legacy

Taylor made a trip to Port Royal, dogged by serious illness, by then determined to return to Britain to die there surrounded by his nephew and nieces. However, he died there in 1813, and never made it back to England.[19]

When Taylor died, there were over 2,000 people on his properties, and his personal estate was valued at more than £750,000. Some calculations put his wealth at over £1 million. He left the majority of his estate to his nephew, the baronet Sir Simon Taylor. However, he made some provisions for his mixed-race children.[20][21][22]

Taylor left £500 to his free mulatto mistress Sarah Hunter, and £1,000 for their reputed daughter, the "Quadroon" Sarah Taylor. In addition, Sarah Taylor's daughter, Sarah Cathcart, was allowed to inherit £2,000 when she turned 21, making these three mixed-race women wealthier than many white subjects in Jamaica at that time. He also left £500 to Grace Harris, the mixed-race niece of Grace Donne. When Hunter died in 1834, she left behind a personal estate of over £1,500, including two horses and 14 slaves.[23] Hunter's prudence contrasted with the spendthrift lifestyle of Taylor's white family.

When Sir Simon Taylor the younger died in 1815, the main share of his estate, including the Jamaican plantations, passed to his eldest niece, Anna, and her husband George Watson-Taylor, making them as wealthy as practically anyone outside of the Royal Family and the aristocracy. However, George squandered much of the family fortune with his spendthrift lifestyle.[24]

Taylor's former estate, Prospect Pen, is now renamed Vale Royal, and is the official residence of the prime minister of Jamaica. However, there are unsurprisingly no reminders in the building of Taylor's former ownership.[25]

References
  1. Christer Petley, White Fury: A Jamaican Slaveholder and the Age of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 19, 34
  2. Petley, White Fury, pp. 31, 213.
  3. https://blog.soton.ac.uk/slaveryandrevolution/simon-taylor-and-jamaican-slavery/ Retrieved 22 May 2019.
  4. Petley, White Fury, pp. 19, 28.
  5. Petley, White Fury, pp. 26-7.
  6. Petley, White Fury, pp. 28-9, 31.
  7. Petley, White Fury, p. 33.
  8. https://opm.gov.jm/1-devon-rd/vale-royal/ Retrieved 13 May 2019.
  9. Petley, White Fury, pp. 101-2.
  10. Petley, White Fury, pp. 33, 98.
  11. Petley, White Fury, pp. 35-6, 81-2, 88-9.
  12. Petley, White Fury, pp. 35-6, 81-2, 88-9.
  13. Petley, White Fury, pp. 82-7.
  14. Petley, White Fury, pp. 87-8.
  15. Daniel Livesay, 'Extended Families: Mixed-race families and the Scottish Experience, 1770-1820' International Journal of Scottish Literature (2008: Issue 4), pp. 1-2. http://www.ijsl.stir.ac.uk/issue4/livesay.pdf Retrieved 22 May 2019.
  16. Petley, White Fury, pp. 190-9.
  17. Petley, White Fury, p. 217.
  18. W.J. Gardner, A History of Jamaica from its Discovery by Christopher Columbus to the Present Time (London: Elliot Stock, 1873), p. 347.
  19. Petley, White Fury, pp. 200-1.
  20. Petley, White Fury, pp. 31, 213.
  21. "Simon Taylor of Jamaica". UCL Legacies of British Slave-Ownership. Retrieved 2019-05-21.
  22. "'Washing the Blackamoor White’: Interracial Intimacy and Coloured Women’s Agency in Jamaica", Meleisa Ono-George in Will Jackson and Emily Manktelow (eds), Subverting Empire: Deviance and Disorder in the British Colonial World (Palgrave, 2015), pp.42-60; http://www.ijsl.stir.ac.uk/issue4/livesay.htm Extended Families: Mixed-Race Children and Scottish Experience, 1770–1820, Daniel Livesay, International Journal of Scottish Literature, Spring/Summer 2008
  23. Petley, White Fury, p. 215.
  24. Petley, White Fury, p. 214.
  25. Petley, White Fury, p. 217.
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